Word: crossed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community at the University of Kentucky, Cross told TIME that "the idea that hatred for Barack Obama played any role in this is rank speculation and completely unwarranted at this juncture." Explains Cross: "Resistance to federal authority in the area dates back more than a century, to the era of major moonshine stills." And for nearly the past three decades, he says, "federal and state authorities have targeted pot growers in Clay and adjoining counties." It is currently marijuana-harvesting season, probably a particularly bad time to randomly knock on doors...
...Cross points out that the economically distressed area's drug activity - from marijuana grown in the national forest to methamphetamines and prescription drugs found elsewhere - is often intermingled with political corruption and that "in the last several years, the Justice Department has won indictments and convictions of officials and other local residents for vote fraud, other corruption and other crimes." The area is within the jurisdiction of the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force, which eventually created another task force to take on political corruption. (See the top 25 crimes of the century...
Clay County, says Martin Hatfield, a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Kentucky, is "certainly an area that's been given a lot of attention from the federal authorities over the past several years. Who knows what kinds of emotions that has stirred up?" In such areas, Cross says, there's a certain tolerance of underground economies - and additional sensitivity to any perceived government snooping. Hatfield notes that local residents may turn a blind eye to drugs and corruption because of fear of retribution. "Fear becomes the norm - people don't know any other way, and it becomes...
...Cross worries that all the attention will only further stigmatize the area as being stereotypically anti-Obama, on top of the reputation it already bears for illegal-drug cultivation, political corruption, government distrust and a general frontier mentality. He recalls the haranguing ABC-TV's Diane Sawyer took from Bill O'Reilly during an interview before the February broadcast of "A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains," her documentary about life in central Appalachia, which includes Clay County. "He basically asked her why anyone should care about that area and said it's a lost cause...
...many of those businesspeople, Snowe says, health insurance has become a "luxury, because the costs are astronomical. They essentially get catastrophic coverage at best." During her last re-election campaign, in 2006, an angry storekeeper in the town of Holden shoved his bill from Blue Cross Blue Shield at Snowe and demanded, "What are you going to do about this?" (See pictures of Republican memorabilia...